1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to processing of sausage and more particulary to improvements in sausage hanger members and their adaptation to high speed automatic clipping machinery.
2. Discription of Prior Art
The processing of link sausage generally requires hand draping or looping of links about a hook or rack device during smoking and other preparatory stages of processing. Thereafter it is stored, packaged and otherwise conditioned and prepared for marketing to customers.
A typical hanger member uitlized for these purposes is more fully shown and described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,943,606 dated Mar. 16, 1976 and U.S. Pat. No. D240,211 dated June 8, 1976, both for Hanger Members issued to Donald J. Ernst of Milwaukee, Wis. Another is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,565,640 dated Feb. 23, 1971 to J. Dohlmann for a Strap For Hanging Sausages.
Hanger Members of this type as well as those other members which have been available heretofore generally are not adaptable for automatic machine application to sausage and like-product casings because the configuration of such hangers is either too large or awkward to be mechanically handled in the confined clipping section of automatic machinery. Consequently, the existing method for attaching a hanger member to casing involves laying the hanger member by hand on the casing and then manually feeding the combination to a clipping device where the member is secured to the casing by a metal clip. Such manual operation generally defeats the advantages of high speed production machinery in that the clipping operation cannot keep pace with the sausage filling operation. This deficiency is sometimes alleviated by utilizing large numbers of laborers to manually clip casings as needed.